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Newly Released Books

It’s rough going for the female characters in this month’s sampling of new fiction. A daughter is sold while her mother sleeps; a woman is kicked around by her lover; a girl goes missing; a young woman is framed for murder; and another lives off the land. Not your typical beach reading.

THE END OF EVERYTHINGBy Megan Abbott246 pages. Reagan Arthur. $23.99.

This slim but stirring novel centers on the mystery of a missing 13-year-old girl named Evie and whether her disappearance has to do with the maroon Skylark spotted circling the neighborhood that day. Then there’s the deeper psychological puzzle of why Evie may have clicked open the door and climbed into the man’s car herself. Her best friend, Lizzie, feels Evie’s absence like a phantom limb. At the same time she thrills to her role as the oracle of everything Evie, placing her close to the heart of the crisis. She especially enjoys the attention and gratitude of Evie’s charming father, who is usually focused on his 17-year-old daughter, Dusty, “a movie star,” according to the worshipful Lizzie, “in halter tops and eyelet and clacking Dr. Scholl’s.” Ms. Abbott’s storytelling feat is to show the near-creepiness of Dad and Dusty’s closeness while making clear how it could have affected a younger sister, making her receptive to another grown man’s interest.

Fifteen-year-old Margo Crane is a great shot. Living on a river in Michigan, she downs bucks without a flinch. But after she’s raped by her uncle, she has a new target in mind. (Hint: It’s in his pants.) She makes her shot all right, but it gets her father killed; her mother had abandoned her not long before. With more in common with Sacagawea than the kids at school, Margo strikes out on her own, to live out of her rowboat, emotionally unmoored. “Margo wasn’t sure she could move forward in time,” Ms. Campbell writes, “when the past kept calling for her attention the way it did.” Various affairs along the way (usually with men who have showers) keep things interesting among the many accounts of fish guttings and entrail scoopings. This may be the early 1980s in the Midwest, but Ms. Campbell’s you-go-girl novel, written in a spare, unflinching style, has the feel of a western. One starring, for a change, a gun-slinging, revenge-seeking young woman.

In this wallop of a little novel (damaged by an off-kilter ending), an average woman burns through a masochistic love affair, flaming out as her need turns to obsession. Ms. Davies writes with such spunk that you stay with her for much of the ride. The woman is working in a nondescript benefits office somewhere in Britain when a man just out of prison (picture Brad Pitt in “Thelma and Louise”) steps up to her desk. Soon enough she’s up against a pillar in the parking garage and eventually addicted to his abusive treatment. In a voice both witty and pathetic, she narrates her own implosion: “Recently, I’d felt like a punctured balloon darting about at a party I wasn’t even invited to, making a slightly embarrassing sound.”

In South Africa in the 1920s you didn’t have to be black to be living in a kind of prison. A woman named Bill is married for a day to a man she actually loves — he’s Jewish; she’s not — when her disapproving father retrieves her. But he can only undo so much; her three spinster aunts hide her away, tut-tutting for nine months, until the baby is born. Then they sell the infant girl to an illegal dealer while Bill is asleep in the next room. Bill finally falls in line and does what’s expected of her, marrying a man who has money and full control. Ms. Kohler, whose previous novels include “Becoming Jane Eyre,” matches her character’s practicality with a matter-of-fact telling. She renders Bill sympathetic but also vain and shallow, the kind of woman who congratulates herself for being generous to the help. Still you relish the power that comes in middle age, when she inherits her husband’s wealth and sets out to find her daughter.

LONG GONEBy Alafair Burke357 pages. Harper. $24.99.

A fitting protagonist for our recessionary times, Alice Humphrey is a young woman in need of a job. The excitement starts when she’s propositioned by a good-looking man at an art opening — not for sex, but with an offer to run her own gallery. Several weeks later she finds his body in a slick of blood. In an of-the-moment twist Alice has been framed with the help of personal details she put on Facebook; in the spirit of “The Fugitive” she has to solve the crime herself to escape arrest. Ms. Burke, a former prosecutor on her seventh thriller, launches multiple competing narratives: a missing teenager; an F.B.I. agent stalking his dead sister’s boyfriend; a preacher accusing the gallery of dealing in kiddie porn; Alice’s famous movie director father embroiled in a tabloid scandal. The strands are many, but the plot stays brisk.

For a reporter Lindsay’s instincts aren’t terribly sharp: she thinks her new boyfriend is pulling back because he’s afraid of feeling too much. Perhaps she’s distracted by all the threats that come her way for writing various articles about Lagos, where she’s assigned during a coup. Ms. Darnton does eventually step on the gas, entangling Lindsay with the C.I.A. and letting her wise up to her boyfriend. Meanwhile this first novel provides a vivid portrait of a troubled country. We learn that driving on the shoulder is punished by whipping, and that ironing panties is necessary to kill any eggs the tumbu fly may have laid while they were drying on the line. Ms. Darnton, a journalist who lived in Africa for five years, including two in Lagos, knows this world well.

A version of this review appears in print on July 21, 2011, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Released. Today's Paper|Subscribe